Brainiac

A ruthless extraterrestrial villain - in reality an ingenious
humanoid computer created by the sinister computer tyrants of a
far-distant planet - who has been an implacable foe of Superman
since July, 1958.

Brainiac is an evil space mastermind and fearsome super-foe with an arsenal of
awesome nightmarish scientific weapons at his command, and is perhaps
the most terrible evil-doer in all the universe, a creature of
superhuman intelligence, great scientific ability, and utter
ruthlessness who is said to know the universe as no mere man knows
it. It was Brainiac who, sometime prior to the death of the planet
Krypton, literally stole the Kryptonian city of Kandor, reducing it to microscopic size with a
diabolical shrinking ray and preserving it aboard his spacecraft
inside a large glass bottle until it was finally recovered by Superman
and placed for safekeeping
inside his Fortress of Solitude.

Although Brainiac - with his green eyes and light-green
skin - closely resembles the humanoid native inhabitants of the
far-distant planet Colu, he is actually a sinister computer spy
created by the computer tyrants which had seized control of that
planet as the first step in a scheme of interplanetary conquest. With
Colu's computer masters having long since been overthrown and
destroyed in a great revolution that toppled them from their pinnacle
of planetary power, Brainiac now remains as the last of the mighty
computer minds who has striven to keep his computer identity a secret,
who is devoid of human emotions, and whose single greatest weakness
may be his lack of insight into human psychology.

In his
initial appearance
he is portrayed as completely bare-headed,
but later texts portray him as having a network of electronic devices
atop his head which are described as the electric terminals of his
sensory nerves.

Brainiac is sometimes accompanied on his marauding journeys through
space by his alien pet, Koko, a white extraterrestrial creature which
closely resembles a small monkey except for the twin antennae
protruding from its forehead.

Because he is a master of super-scientific forces as well as the most
terrible of all space villains, Brainiac possesses an awesome arsenal
of super-scientific weapons and devices to aid him in his never-ending
war against Superman. Even Lex Luthor, the world's most dangerous
criminal scientist, has been moved to adopt some of Brainiac's more
ingenious devices.

Perhaps the most important weapon in Brainiac's arsenal is his
ultrasophisticated space-time craft, a weird vehicle capable of
accelerating to such phenomenal velocities that it can literally
penetrate the time barrier and travel through time as well as space.
Portrayed sometimes as a flying saucer and at other times as a
bizarre, light-bulb-shaped vehicle, it is surrounded by an invisible
force field - or ultra-force barrier - which nothing in the
universe can penetrate, and is crammed full of superscientific
apparatus, including the amazing hyper-force machine built into the
control panel.

It is by means of the hyper-forces emanating from this ingenious
device - which is described as powered by hyper-batteries
energized by cosmic rays - that Brainiac committed what has been
called the greatest crime in the universe: the shrinking of the
Kryptonian city of Kandor to microscopic size so that it could be
imprisoned aboard his space-time craft inside a large glass bottle.
The hyper-force ray is referred to as a reducing ray in at least one
text and as a shrinking ray in several others.

Another superscientific apparatus employed by Brainiac is the
special power-belt which surrounds the villain with an impenetrable
ultra shell which even the heat of Superman's X-ray vision cannot
penetrate.

Brainiac is a villain of such outstanding notoriety that Superman has
devoted an entire room to him in his Fortress of Solitude. The
so-called Brainiac Room contains a statue of the villain, a model of
his space-time craft, and an array of scientific machinery constructed
by Superman in connection with his experiments aimed at penetrating
Brainiac's force-field.

In his early textual appearances, Brainiac is portrayed as a sinister
alien who has been roaming the universe in his spacecraft, using his
hyper-force machine to kidnap whole cities from various planets so
that he can use them to found a new empire on his own desolate world,
where the population has been decimated by a hideous plague. Indeed,
the inference is unmistakable that Brainiac was once the ruler of the
planet he now seeks to repopulate in this mosaic manner. "Yes, Koko," he gloats to his
alien pet after stealing Paris in July 1958, "I will take a dozen
cities-in-the-bottle back to repopulate my home world, where a plague
wiped out my people! Then I will restore all the cities to their
original size and have a new empire to rule, as before!"

In February 1964, however, while probing the universe with his
time-space thought-scanner in the hope of locating an ally capable of
helping him destroy Superman, Lex Luthor discovers that he has
contacted a vastly powerful mind on a distant planet, years in the
past. Carefully adjusting the controls of his uncanny instrument in
order to get the mental picture clearer, Luthor finds that he has
tuned in on the mind of Master Computer One, an electronic brain of
towering intellect created by the green-skinned humanoid inhabitants
of a far-distant planet. "A human mind is only a sixth-level
effector," remarks one of the alien scientists associated with the
construction of the master computer, "but the new computer is built to
be a tenth-level effector!"

As the years passed, the green-skinned aliens built many such
computers. Before long, however, the powerful master computers had
wrested control of their planet from the humanoid civilization that
had created them and had begun using weapons of awesome
destructiveness to enforce their tyranny over the people.

As Luthor continues to survey the history of this distant planet with
his time-space thought-scanner, he learns that the power-hungry
mechanical minds soon concocted a diabolical scheme of interplanetary
conquest. "We must extend our wise rule to all worlds governed by
foolish humans!" asserted one computer, "First we'll send a computer
spy to reconnoiter those worlds!"

"Our spy would be detected and destroyed unless he deceived them by
looking human," observed a second computer, "We'll make a computer of
powerful intelligence that looks human!"

And so, in the weeks that followed, an ingenious computer spy was
built to carry out acts of interplanetary espionage for the evil
master computers that had created it. Although their advanced
technology would have enabled them to equip their new spy with a
twelfth-order mind superior to their own, the computers decided to
endow it with only a tenth-level effector mind as a safeguard against
its attempting to capitalize on its superior intelligence in order to
dominate its creators.

The master computers christened their humanoid computer-spy Brainiac.
To ensure that he would not only look human, but act human as well,
they fed the mental patterns of one of their planet's scientists into
Brainiac's memory banks, thereby endowing him with a full range of
human mannerisms. The master computers attempted to further enhance
the credibility of Brainiac's human masquerade by selecting a boy from
among their planet's green-skinned inhabitants to accompany Brainiac
on his travels and pose as his son. The youngster chosen for the
task, whom the master computers renamed Brainiac II, had no intention
of allowing himself to become the tool of an evil computer, however,
and at the earliest opportunity he ran away and escaped, forcing
Brainiac to climb into his spacecraft and set out on his
interplanetary espionage mission without him.

It was this boy who, in
Brainiac's absence, ultimately led his people in the great revolution
that destroyed the computer tyrants that had seized control of their
planet. That courageous youngster, whose real name was Vril Dox, was
the ancestor of Brainiac 5, one of the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes.